Fair enough. I understand your theory now, and it seems consistent with the evidence. But why do you have 90% confidence that Voldemort's reading is wrong?
Also, if you're taking the contract completely literally, then Baba Yaga can harm students all she likes, as long as she doesn't shed any blood. A powerful Dark Lady should easily have the spell arsenal and creativity. In fact, if killing a student doesn't count as "taking" their life (which works on a poetic reading, but not on a practical one - a person's life is who they are, not something separate from them which can be taken), then "there is indeed a certain useful spell which solves the problem" quite nicely.
I am assuming the goblet is borrowing the natural language parsing of the people subject to it, sorting hat style. And no one not being argumentative on the internet would read it that way. Which means it really is a flawless blanket protection from intentional harm, and the blood part is utterly redundant.
As for why I'm so sure Voldemort is wrong:
Well, there is the outside view, in which I just have trouble with the idea that a 16 year old virgin is a sufficiently supreme plotter, manipulator and cold-blooded killer to pull this off on someone who has ...
New long chapter! Since I expect its discussion to generate more than 160 comments (which would push the previous thread over the 500 comment limit) before the next chapter is posted, here is a new thread.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 108
(and chapter 109, once it comes out on Monday).EDIT: There have now been two separate calls for having one thread per chapter, along with a poll in this thread. If the poll in this thread indicates a majority preference for one thread per chapter by Monday, I will edit this post to make it for chapter 108 only. In that case a new thread for chapter 109 should be posted by whoever gets a chance and wants to after the chapter is released.
EDIT 2: The poll indicates a large majority (currently 78%) in favor of one thread per chapter. This post has been edited accordingly.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: